Israel’s approval of a long-delayed and controversial settlement plan on Wednesday intends to end any chance of a contiguous Palestinian state, say analysts, local human rights groups and Palestinian communities likely to be affected.

Known as East1 or E1, the plan would link thousands of illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem – which is already illegally annexed by Israel – to the expanding Maale Adumim settlement bloc in the occupied West Bank.

This would fully sever East Jerusalem – which Palestinians have long considered the capital of their own future state  – from the rest of the occupied West Bank.

European states have long warned that the E1 plan is a red line, said Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group (ICG).

Some of these states, such as Ireland, France, Norway and Spain, have recently announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state in the face of mounting pressure to take action against Israel for its war in Gaza.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, warned last year that a new settlement would be established for every country that recognises Palestine.

More recently, Smotrich, who himself lives in an illegal settlement on Palestinian land, said last week that the E1 plan would “bury” hopes for a Palestinian state.

Israeli politicians, including Smotrich, have long been open in remarking that the establishment of settlements in the occupied West Bank creates “facts on the ground” and regard the territory as an integral part of the “land of Israel”.

Mustafa said that Israel calculated long ago that the global community would take no meaningful action to stop Israel from killing the two-state solution.

“There won’t be anything left to recognise if these states keep allowing Israel to annex the West Bank and destroy Gaza,” she told Al Jazeera.

Opportune

The E1 plan was first drummed up in 1994 under then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, just a year after he inked the United States-backed Oslo Accords, which ostensibly aimed to bring about a Palestinian state before the new millennium

In 2004, Israel began building a police station and constructing new roads in that area of Palestinian land. Since then, construction and further planning have been mostly frozen to appease Western leaders, who feared that building thousands of new housing units there would make it impossible to establish a Palestinian state across the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Yet since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, the US and Europe have allowed Israel to violate every previous “red line” in the name of “self-defence”, said analysts and human rights monitors.

Over the last two years, Israel has carried out its war on Gaza – killing more than 62,000 Palestinians and destroying the territory – and has violently attacked large swaths of the West Bank, forcing out tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

Israeli soldiers and settlers have also ramped up their violence against Palestinians, killing more than 1,000 people without repercussions.

Israel is now betting on its strong support from US President Donald Trump to accelerate the E1 plan, which would put the final “bullet” in the coffin of a Palestinian state and uproot Palestinian Bedouin communities, said Murad Jadallah, a researcher with the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq.

“Israel knows that now is the time [to go through with the E1 plan] because it has US support in Washington to do so,” Mustafa, from the ICG, told Al Jazeera.

Along with severing East Jerusalem, the controversial plan would physically split the north of the West Bank from the south, further confining Palestinians to ever smaller and isolated pockets of land.

On top of that, several thousand people live in 18 Palestinian shepherd communities in the area encompassing the E1 settlement plan.

The United Nations and Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups have said this plan would uproot Palestinian communities and likely constitute a “forced transfer of a population”, which is a crime against humanity under international law.

“It is very strategic for Israel to push these communities [off their land],” said Al-Haq’s Jadallah.

Fighting to stay

For decades, shepherd communities in the Jordan Valley have protected the possibility of a Palestinian state by refusing to leave their land, despite facing repeated settler attacks and demolition orders.

Most of these communities migrated to Khan al-Ahmar – an area in the central West Bank between Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement – after they were driven out of the Naqeb (Negev) desert by Israel in the 1950s.

The expulsions were part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing, in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands by Zionist militias to make way for the state of Israel –  an event Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or Catastrophe.

Imad al-Jahalin, the leader of a shepherd community in Bir al-Maskub, one of many villages in the E1 zone, says his community has managed to protect itself from expulsion for years.

Last year, the community hired an Israeli Jewish lawyer to file a lawsuit against settlers who occupied some of their homes. The rights group Amnesty has previously accused the Israeli court system of serving to “rubber stamp” Israel’s occupation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Still, al-Jahalin said his village managed to win a court order to kick out the settlers from their homes. That order was implemented, but he worries they may not win another legal battle if the state begins implementing the E1 plan.

“There is fear and panic because we don’t know if this [settlement] is going to cut through our village and houses,” he told Al Jazeera.

But Jadallah is quite certain that the E1 plan will uproot Bedouin communities in and around Khan al-Ahmar, adding that they will be forced to migrate to large cities in the West Bank.

Their forced displacement to urban centres would require them to leave their livelihoods as shepherds behind.

“Palestinian history and society is losing one layer – or component  – from its identity [because of Israeli attacks against Bedouins],” he told Al Jazeera.

Irreversible changes

The E1 plan should be understood as the culmination of Israeli attempts to change the spatial reality of the West Bank, so that a Palestinian state will never come to fruition, said Mustafa from the ICG.

She added that this is a strategy Israel has deployed since signing the Oslo Accords.

Israel, for instance, has long uprooted entire Palestinian villages and dispersed communities, bulldozed bustling refugee camps and erected dozens of barricades to impede the movement of Palestinians.

“The fact Israel is able … to reshape the urban landscape of the West Bank and make [those changes] so irreversible is indicative that Israel has no intention of committing to a two-state solution,” she said.

Alon Cohen, the head of the West Bank area for Bimkom, an Israeli human rights organisation advocating for an end to the occupation, added that there is no economic or housing rationale for implementing E1.

He stressed that the logic behind E1 was to simply encroach and irreversibly fragment Palestinian territory.

“Israel always uses settlement planning as a weapon,” he told Al Jazeera.

Both Mustafa and Cohen believe the implementation of E1 will make life for Palestinians in the West Bank even more unbearable, stressing that the ultimate plan is to push more Palestinians to consider leaving the West Bank.

However, al-Jahalin said that’s not an option for him and his community in Bir al-Maskub.

“Nobody here has any idea where they will end up in the future [if we are forcefully displaced],” he told Al Jazeera.

“[Our] people for now … are not thinking of going anywhere.”

Israel’s military has intensified its attacks on Gaza City with air strikes on heavily populated areas, as it pushes ahead with the initial stage of an operation to seize the enclave’s main urban centre that could forcibly displace close to one million Palestinians.

Among the victims of the Israeli assault on Gaza City on Thursday were six people, including four children, killed in the southern Sabra neighbourhood, a source at the nearby al-Ahli Hospital told Al Jazeera.

Footage from the scene of one of the attacks east of Sheikh Radwan showed the bodies of the dead and badly wounded strewn across the street amid flames and wreckage from the attack.

The victims in Gaza City were among at least 40 Palestinians killed across the territory since dawn, hospital sources in Gaza told Al Jazeera, eight of whom were reportedly seeking aid.

Among the other victims were five Palestinians killed by an Israeli drone strike northwest of Khan Younis, and at least three killed by Israeli forces near an aid centre north of Rafah, sources told Al Jazeera. In the north of the enclave, four people were killed and 10 injured in Israeli shelling of Jabalia al-Balad, emergency sources told Al Jazeera, while in central Gaza, five people, including two children, were killed while waiting for aid near the so-called Netzarim axis, a source at Al-Awda Hospital said.

In Gaza City, where Israeli troops are posted on the outskirts, thousands of Palestinians continued to flee their homes in a bid to escape the escalating offensive, amid heavy shelling of densely populated neighbourhoods like Sabra and Tuffah.

“We are facing a bitter, bitter situation, to die at home or leave and die somewhere else; as long as this war continues, survival is uncertain,” Rabah Abu Elias, a 67-year-old father of seven, told the Reuters news agency.

“In the news, they speak about a possible truce. On the ground, we only hear explosions and see deaths. To leave Gaza City or not isn’t an easy decision to make.”

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud said the Israeli military was repeating a strategy it had used previously in Gaza, “targeting densely populated neighbourhoods to depopulate them”.

Israeli troops had previously taken the same approach in the eastern Gaza City neighbourhoods of Tuffah and Shujayea, he said, and were now deploying the tactics in the Zeitoun and Sabra districts in the southeast of the city.

Nowhere is safe

Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum said that for those fleeing the Israeli offensive on Gaza City, there were no safe havens in the enclave, as places that had been supposedly deemed safe by the Israeli military had repeatedly been targeted.

“They feel they have been hunted without any safe place to go to,” he said.

Abu Azzoum was nearby when a makeshift camp housing displaced Palestinians in Deir el-Balah was struck in an Israeli bombardment on Thursday, close to the city’s al-Aqsa Hospital. Footage he captured at the site of the attack showed chaotic scenes, as huge plumes of smoke rose from the attacked area.

“It’s only 9am … and the Israeli military is already scaling up attacks in Gaza,” he said.

Israel’s military has said it will call up 60,000 reservists as it pursues the operation to seize Gaza City, despite widespread international condemnation, some domestic opposition, and warnings that the offensive will deepen the humanitarian catastrophe and forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of people to concentration zones in southern Gaza.

Close to one million Palestinians are believed to be in Gaza City, where Israeli tanks have been pushing closer to the city’s centre this week.

“The intensification of hostilities in Gaza means more killing, more displacement, more destruction and more panic,” Christian Cardon, chief spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Al Jazeera.

“Gaza is a closed space, from which nobody can escape … and where access to healthcare, food and safe water is dwindling,” he said. “This is intolerable.”

The head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said at a briefing in Geneva that child malnutrition in Gaza City had risen sixfold since March.

“We have a population that is extremely weak that will be confronted with a new major military operation,” he said. “Many will simply not have the strength to undergo a new displacement.”

Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Thursday that there had been two more deaths in the territory due to malnutrition in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of victims of famine and malnutrition during the war to 271, including 112 children.

It said that a total of 70 people had been killed and 356 wounded by Israeli fire in the enclave in the same period, based on the numbers brought to hospitals in Gaza, while still more victims remained trapped beneath rubble.

‘Beginning of ethnic cleansing’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing ahead with the Gaza City offensive despite renewed efforts to reach a ceasefire, including the latest ceasefire proposal that Hamas has responded positively to.

The decision to push ahead with the operation shows the Israeli government has “no intention to put an end to the war”, Gideon Levy, columnist for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, told Al Jazeera.

“There is no other way to explain it,” he said. “There is a Hamas offer on the table and Israel hasn’t even discussed it yet.

“So, either they [Israel] want to put more pressure on Hamas, which I’m not sure is very probable, or they’re really serious about reconquering Gaza City, pushing all the people to the south and then offering them to leave the Gaza Strip.

“That’s the beginning of an ethnic cleansing of Gaza,” he said.

Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands said the operation had been “demanded” by Netanyahu despite military opposition.

“His generals didn’t really want it. They pushed back, saying it was a trap for the military, that the military was tired after nearly two years of fighting, and wasn’t ready for it. But Netanyahu wanted it.”

He said there was a risk for Israel that the army would fail “because the army is not ready for it, and the reservists won’t turn up or they’ll turn up late, and it just doesn’t have the capability to pursue this operation”.

Israeli public opinion was also swinging against the war, he said, noting, “We understand that a majority of Israelis now want the war to finish.”

London, United Kingdom – Jonathon Porritt, a 75-year-old Oxford-educated environmentalist, is among the hundreds of people that the UK has cracked down on over their support of Palestine Action.

He was arrested and charged earlier this month, under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act, for holding up a sign at a rally decrying the government’s decision to outlaw the protest group.

“I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action,” read the cardboard placard that he, and many of the 520 others arrested, raised.

His bail hearing is scheduled for late October.

But Porritt is not a hardened criminal.

He spent 30 years advising the king on environmental issues when the monarch held the Prince of Wales title. He has also chaired a sustainable development commission set up by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and throughout his career has worked in politics, academia and directed Friends of the Earth. In 2000, he was awarded a CBE, a high-ranking order, for services to environmental protection.

Al Jazeera spoke to Porritt about his activism, Palestine, the role of business and the effect of weapons manufacturing on climate change.

Al Jazeera: As the crisis in Gaza worsens, you have urged the UK to take action to stop Israel’s onslaught. With more than 700 other business leaders, you recently called for targeted sanctions against those accused of violating international law, including war crimes. Does that include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, since he is wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court?

Jonathan Porritt: It would certainly include members of his cabinet who have been very forthright in the comments that they’ve made, which clearly breach any understanding of the rights of people to exist … and indicate a readiness to ethnically cleanse Gaza and indeed to prepare to do the same in the West Bank.

It’s very clear that those sanctions do now need to be brought forward, and I think it is important that it’s business leaders that are suggesting that you just can’t allow those kinds of blatant attacks on the Palestinian people to continue.

Al Jazeera: On an individual level, many people appalled at Israel’s conduct in Gaza have joined a campaign to boycott Israeli goods, in an attempt at hitting the economy that fuels the war. Is this an effective way to stem the violence?

Porritt: It is something I do on an individual level. And this is purely personal, but I would be deeply unhappy buying anything exported into the UK from Israel. I feel that the government of Israel at the moment and its track record in terms of the way it’s dealt with the situation in Gaza and the West Bank is so repugnant to me personally that I feel uncomfortable supporting the economic standing of that country, so that’s my own personal choice.

I don’t go out of my way to suggest that everybody needs to do that.

I think lifestyle decisions are really important, ethical decisions are really important, but do they actually change very much? Probably not, is the reality, and an awful lot of people simply don’t know the issues behind these choices.

Al Jazeera: Your arrest earlier this month made headlines. What do you think figures such as King Charles and Tony Blair, who you’ve worked with, would make of your radical activism?

Porritt: I was comfortable taking on establishment roles as chair of the commission [launched by Blair], for instance, [and] helping to set up the Prince of Wales’s business and sustainability programme, all that kind of stuff. But my life started as an activist in the Green Party and in Friends of the Earth, so they probably always knew that I was more predisposed to that tactical route than to the inside track that I nonetheless spent 30 years pursuing.

Al Jazeera: With several wars raging, is the link between militaries and weapons companies, which are major carbon polluters, and climate change being talked about enough?

Porritt: No, and this really bugs me a lot.

The investment in nuclear weapons of one kind or another, upgrades going on all over the world, and increasing the number of warheads again – this is just crazy, and on the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima you think, how can that possibly be?

And then, then you look at the environmental impacts of all of that, of course, including the CO2 footprint of vast increases in expenditure on arms, and it’s just the worst possible way of trying to increase security for people in their own country – to make these hugely carbon-intensive and destructive investments and yet more weapons of mass destruction.

Al Jazeera: The UK has proscribed Palestine Action as a terror organisation, but its backers say outlawing the group is a way to silence dissent as Israel wages war in Gaza. It is now legally challenging the proscription. What does Palestine Action stand for, in your view?

Porritt: What Palestine Action actually stands for is a readiness to use violence against property as part of its campaigning tactics against, in particular, those arms companies [that are] deeply complicit in the continuing genocide in Gaza. They see as being proportionate when set against the devastation going on in Gaza.

That choice about tactics is morally based, wholly defensible … and in no way indicative of a formally designated terrorist organisation.

In the last few years, there’s been an astonishing legal crackdown on basic rights in this country, particularly the right to the freedom of speech and the right to freedom to protest

The designation as a terrorist organisation … is to try and silence Palestine Action. That’s where I come back to the now incontrovertible proof of the UK government’s complicity in this genocide, and because of that complicity – its continuation of licences for arms quite clearly being used to massacre innocent people across Gaza – if you look at that complicity, they needed something extra. They needed an even bigger stick to shut Palestine Action up so that the citizens of the UK were not permitted to recognise just how abhorrent this government’s behaviour is.